dynamodb-pricing-comparison

Analyze your DynamoDB usage on the AWS cloud, and see the pricing for an equivalent usage of ScyllaDB’s Alternator, which is a drop-in alternative for DynamoDB.

For the sake of simplicity the usage of both on-demand and provisioned tables is expressed in read or write capacity units. In the case of provisioned tables, it corresponds to the provisioned capacity. In the case of on-demand tables, by default it corresponds to the average usage per second over the last 30 days, and it can be configured (see the from-date and to-date options). Providing a custom time range is useful in case the usage pattern of the tables over the last 30 days is not representative of a typical workload.

The application is available as an AWS Serverless Application, or a Node.js command-line application.

The AWS Serverless Application can be installed in a few clicks and makes it easy to share your results within your organization.

The command-line interface requires Node.js and aws to be installed on your machine, and can be more convenient to use for scripting purpose.

Install and Use the AWS Serverless Application

Install the AWS Serverless Application

The simplest way to use the application is to deploy the version published to the AWS Serverless Application Repository. Alternatively, you can build the application from the sources and deploy it with the AWS SAM CLI.

Deploy from the Serverless Application Repository

1. Open the Serverless Application Repository.
2. In the top-right corner, select the region in which you want to analyse your DynamoDB usage.
3. Search for the application “dynamodb-pricing-comparison”. Make sure to tick the box “Show apps that create custom IAM roles or resource policies”. In case the application is not available in your region, follow the manual deployment process below or open a new issue.
4. Click on the application name to open the deployment screen.
5. Tick the box “I acknowledge that this app creates custom IAM roles.” Please note that the application will create IAM roles to query your DynamoDB usage. More specifically, the application needs to be granted the right to perform the actions dynamodb:ListTables, dynamodb:DescribeTable, and cloudwatch:GetMetricData. The application will not read, change, delete, or share any of your data.
6. Edit the stack name if desired, and choose “Deploy”.
7. You should be redirected to the newly created Lambda application. After the deployment finishes, you should see an endpoint in the “API endpoint” box.
8. Click that endpoint to collect metrics about your DynamoDB usage and visualize the results on a web page. The web page displays a summary of your usage of provisioned tables, and a summary of your usage of on-demand tables, with links to Scylla Cloud pricing calculator to estimates your possible savings if you switch to ScyllaDB. See the “Use” section below for more options.

To delete the application, delete the CloudFormation stack that was created during the deployment step. Open the CloudFormation console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudformation#/stacks. Find the deployed stack (for example, look for serverlessrepo-dynamodb-pricing-comparison), and choose “Delete”.

Build and Deploy from Sources

You need the following tools:

• Git.
• AWS SAM CLI.
• Node.js, including the npm package management tool.

Start by cloning this repository:

git clone https://github.com/scylladb/dynamodb-pricing-comparison.git
cd dynamodb-pricing-comparison

To build and deploy the application for the first time, run the following in your shell:

sam build
sam deploy --guided

The first command will build the source of the application. The second command will package and deploy the application to AWS, with a series of prompts:

• Stack Name: The name of the stack to deploy to CloudFormation. This should be unique to your account and region, and a good starting point would be something matching your project name.
• AWS Region: The AWS region you want to deploy your app to.
• Confirm changes before deploy: If set to yes, any change sets will be shown to you before execution for manual review. If set to no, the AWS SAM CLI will automatically deploy application changes.
• Allow SAM CLI IAM role creation: Many AWS SAM templates, including this application, create AWS IAM roles required for the AWS Lambda function(s) included to access AWS services. By default, these are scoped down to minimum required permissions. To deploy an AWS CloudFormation stack which creates or modifies IAM roles, the CAPABILITY_IAM value for capabilities must be provided. If permission isn't provided through this prompt, to deploy this example you must explicitly pass --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM to the sam deploy command.
• CollectDynamoDBCosts has no authentication: The deployed application will be publicly accessible (but the URL will be hard to guess).
• Save arguments to samconfig.toml: If set to yes, your choices will be saved to a configuration file inside the project, so that in the future you can just re-run sam deploy without parameters to deploy changes to the application.

The following output will be displayed in the outputs when the deployment is complete:

• API Gateway endpoint URL

Open that endpoint URL to collect metrics about your DynamoDB usage and visualize the results on a web page. See the “Use” section below for more options.

To delete the application, you can use the AWS CLI. Assuming you used dynamodb-pricing-comparison for the stack name, you can run the following:

sam delete --stack-name dynamodb-pricing-comparison

Use the AWS Serverless Application

The installation process outputs the URL of an API endpoint that you can call to collect metrics about your DynamoDB usage.

You can pass options as query parameters. See below the supported options. For instance, to export your DynamoDB usage into a CSV file, use the following command:

curl "${API_GATEWAY_ENDPOINT_URL}?format=csv" > dynamodb-usage.csv

Where API_GATEWAY_ENDPOINT_URL is the URL of the API endpoint produced by the installation process.

Install and Use the Command-Line Interface

You need the following tools:

• Git.
• Node.js version 14 or higher.
• AWS CLI.

Start by cloning this repository:

git clone https://github.com/scylladb/dynamodb-pricing-comparison.git
cd dynamodb-pricing-comparison

Install the application dependencies:

npm install --prefix ./backend

Make sure that your AWS credentials are up-to-date in ~/.aws, or run aws configure to configure the region and account to collect the DynamoDB usage from.

Run the command-line interface:

bin/dynamodb-pricing-comparison.mjs > dynamodb-usage.html

Then open the file dynamodb-usage.html in a web browser.

Pass the --help argument to show the usage documentation:

bin/dynamodb-pricing-comparison.mjs --help

You can pass options as command-line arguments. See below the list of supported options. Prefix each option name with --. For instance, to export your DynamoDB usage into a CSV file, use the following command:

bin/dynamodb-pricing-comparison.mjs --format=csv > dynamodb-usage.csv

Options

• format: Accepted values are either html or csv. This parameter is optional and defaults to html. With html, the endpoint produces an HTML page that can be rendered by a Web browser. With csv, the endpoint produces a CSV document with the following columns:

  • Table name
  • Billing mode (PAY_PER_REQUEST, or PROVISIONED)
  • Table size (bytes)
  • Average item size (bytes)
  • Read capacity units
  • Write capacity units
  • ScyllaDB cloud pricing comparison

• from-date: Start date to use when collecting usage of on-demand tables. By default, the start date is 30 days ago. It must be supplied if to-date is supplied. Valid format: ISO 8601 dates such as YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm, e.g. 2024-08-05 or 2024-08-05T08:00.

• to-date: End date to use when collecting usage of on-demand tables. By default, the end date is the date of today. Valid format: ISO 8601 dates such as YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm, e.g. 2024-08-05 or 2024-08-05T08:00.

Contribute

See the CONTRIBUTING.md file to learn how to build, maintain, and publish the application.

License

The content of this repository is released under the Apache 2.0 License.